He couldn’t tell if that was Helen’s decision or her mother’s. He lugged the suitcase to the Mini and dumped it in the boot. “You’re sure you don’t mind if I take the mirror,” he said.
“If you want to try and mend it, be my guest. I’ve never had any use for it,” Carol said, doling him a token wave to speed him on his way before she shut herself in the house.
As the Mini backed onto the street he muttered “Here you go, old bones,” crouching his lanky frame lower so that the dent in the roof didn’t touch his scalp. On the seat beside him shards of glass stirred in the marble frame, but he could see nothing other than the underside of the roof in even the largest piece of mirror. He scarcely knew why he was taking the mirror with him; could it somehow help him gain control of the depths of his mind and let Dorothy go? The boarding-house swung away behind him, and he wondered what the people in it might be thinking about him—worse, what they might be storing up about him unexamined in their minds. For the first time in all his years he dreaded living after death.
The Retrospective (2002)
Trent had no idea how long he was unable to think for rage. The guard kept out of sight while she announced the unscheduled stop, and didn’t reappear until the trainload of passengers had crowded onto the narrow platform. As the train dragged itself away into a tunnel simulated by elderly trees and the low March afternoon sky that was plastered with layers of darkness, she poked her head out of the rearmost window to announce that the next train should be due in an hour. The resentful mutters of the crowd only aggravated Trent’s frustration. He needed a leisurely evening and, if he could manage it for a change, a night’s sleep in preparation for a working breakfast. If he’d known the journey would be broken, he could have reread his paperwork instead of contemplating scenery he couldn’t even remember. No doubt the next train would already be laden with commuters - he doubted it would give him space to work. His skull was beginning to feel shrivelled and hollow when it occurred to him that if he caught a later train he would both ensure himself a seat and have time to drop in on his parents. When had he last been home to see them? All at once he felt so guilty that he preferred not to look anyone in the face as he excused his slow way to the ticket office.
It was closed - a board lent it the appearance of a frame divested of a photograph - but flanked by a timetable. Stoneby to London, Stoneby to London . . . There were trains on the hour, like the striking of a clock. He emerged from the short wooden passage into the somewhat less gloomy street, only to falter. Where was the sweet shop whose window used to exhibit dozens of glass-stoppered jars full of colours he could taste? Where was the toyshop fronted by a headlong model train that had never stopped for the travellers paralysed on the platform? What had happened to the bakery displaying tiered white cakes elaborate as Gothic steeples, and the bridal shop next door, where the headless figures in their pale dresses had made him think of Anne Boleyn? Now the street was overrun with the same fast-food eateries and immature clothes shops that surrounded him whenever he left his present apartment, and he couldn’t recall how much change he’d seen on his last visit, whenever that had been. He felt suddenly so desperate to be somewhere more like home that he almost didn’t wait for twin green men to pipe up and usher him across the road.
The short cut was still there, in a sense. Instead of separating the toyshop from the wedding dresses, it squeezed between a window occupied by a regiment of boots and a hamburger outlet dogged by plastic cartons. Once he was in the alley the clamour of traffic relented, but the narrow passage through featureless discoloured concrete made him feel walled in by the unfamiliar. Then the concrete gave way to russet bricks and released him into a street he knew.
At least, it conformed to his memory until he looked closer. The building opposite, which had begun life as a music hall, had ceased to be a cinema. A pair of letters clung to the whitish border of the rusty iron marquee, two letters N so insecure they were on the way to being Zs. He was striving to remember if the cinema had been shut last time he’d seen it when he noticed that the boards on either side of the lobby contained posters too small for the frames. The neighbouring buildings were boarded up. As he crossed the deserted street, the posters grew legible. MEMORIES OF STONEBY, the amateurish printing said.
The two wide steps beneath the marquee were cracked and chipped and stained. The glass of the ticket booth in the middle of the marble door was too blackened to see through. Behind the booth the doors into the auditorium stood ajar. Uncertain what the gap was showing him, he ventured to peer in.
At first the dimness yielded up no more than a strip of carpet framed by floorboards just as grubby, and then he thought someone absolutely motionless was watching him from the dark. The watcher was roped off from him - the several indistinct figures were. He assumed they represented elements of local history: there was certainly something familiar about them. That impression, and the blurred faces with their dully glinting eyes, might have transfixed him if he hadn’t remembered that he was supposed to be seeing his parents. He left the echo of his footsteps dwindling in the lobby and hurried around the side of the museum.
Where the alley crossed another he turned left along the rear of the building. In the high wall to his right a series of solid wooden gates led to back yards, the third of which belonged to his old house. As a child he’d used the gate as a short cut to the cinema, clutching a coin in his fist, which had smelled of metal whenever he’d raised it to his face in the crowded restless dark. His parents had never bolted the gate until he was home again, but now the only effect of his trying the latch was to rouse a clatter of claws and the snarling of a neighbour’s dog that sounded either muzzled or gagged with food, and so he made for the street his old house faced.
The sunless sky was bringing on a twilight murky as an unlit room. He could have taken the street for an aisle between two blocks of dimness so lacking in features they might have been identical. Presumably any children who lived in the terrace were home from school by now, though he couldn’t see the flicker of a single television in the windows draped with dusk, while the breadwinners had yet to return. Trent picked his way over the broken upheaved slabs of the pavement, supporting himself on the roof of a lone parked car until it shifted rustily under his hand, to his parents’ front gate.
The small plot of a garden was a mass of weeds that had spilled across the short path. He couldn’t feel it underfoot as he tramped to the door, which was the colour of the oncoming dark. He was fumbling in his pocket and then with the catches of his briefcase when he realised he would hardly have brought his old keys with him. He rang the doorbell, or at least pressed the askew pallid button that set off a muffled rattle somewhere in the house.
For the duration of more breaths than he could recall taking, there was no response. He was about to revive the noise, though he found it somehow distressing, when he heard footsteps shuffling down the hall. Their slowness made it sound as long as it had seemed in his childhood, so that he had the odd notion that whoever opened the door would tower over him.
It was his mother, and smaller than ever - wrinkled and whitish as a figure composed of dough that had been left to collect dust, a wad of it on top of and behind her head. She wore a tweed coat over a garment he took to be a nightdress, which exposed only her prominent ankles above a pair of unmatched slippers. Her head wavered upwards as the corners of her lips did. Once all these had steadied she murmured ‘Is it you, Nigel? Are you back again?’
‘I thought it was past time I was.’
‘It’s always too long.’ She shuffled in a tight circle to present her stooped back to him before calling ‘Guess who it is, Walter.’